Carceri
Carceri,(more fully, the Tarterian Depths of Carceri), is the home of evil without joy, humor, comfort, real affection, hope or meaning, where each layer is an endless string of spheres, and all spheres glow with a lurid red light. The spheres of various layers are concentric, though sizes differ wildly. It seems to me that on this chaotic plane, collisions would be likely here rather than among the blocks of Acheron. Demodands (gehreleths) dominate some communities. These creatures are rumored to provide living authors with visions of cosmic angst, bitterness, and senselessness. All creatures suffer from terrible tedium and weariness. Souls finding their way to Carceri include religionists who have emphasized the cruelty of nature, secretive sex criminals, individual bullies, purveyors of bunko religions, and common career criminals. There's no real love here -- as on the other planes of evil, the locals think it's wrong and fake, and that no one is genuinely good. Many of the things that they enjoy most are probably better left undescribed. The spiritual powers here seek to corrupt souls by encouraging ennui, egomania, revenge motives, or the desire to cause suffering to others. Beware -- those who sample these dark pleasures may find they have no joy in anything else. The locals may surprise visitors with their knowledge of any un-repented crimes they may have committed. They'll remind visitors of times when they've failed to show simple kindness, and when they've been mistreated or rejected -- and try to persuade them that they should recognize that the dwellers in Carceri are right. The locals take much satisfaction in telling visitors that all supposed altruism is simply a mask for secret, selfish agendas. Because evil is so powerful here, the locals lack even the ordinary loves of our world -- family, friendship, romance. These instead become ways in which a stronger being preys on a weaker being. The locals will talk a lot about cruelty as a way of "building character." The residents of Carceri find the idea of unselfish love to be utterly disgusting. Open-faced evil is poor politics. The locals will present themselves to outsiders as people with just grievances, fighting for what they deserve rather than "being weak". Their attitude makes them appallingly cruel, and given the opportunity, they will commit the vilest acts against one another and against visitors. Evil deeds, or any use of death magic or necromancer's spells might tend to transform the character progressively. Living or dead, the locals are all bitter, plot revenge, and seem constitutionally incapable of telling the entire truth. Lost souls often take the form of maggots. The people of Carceri probably form communities of primitive savagery, in contrast to the "noble savages" of the Beastands and of our own world's Rousseauean fantasy. Primitives from the prime worlds will find heaps of skulls, human hearts, and other detritus of atrocities. Public portals between the layers and to remote planes are marked by masses of filth and decay. Portals or no, don't expect it to be easy to leave Carceri. Even the magic you have used in the past for interplanar travel may not work on Carceri. Othrys is a universe of canals, polluted rivers, foul swampland, quicksand, disease, and open graves. The mountains are the homes of the egomaniac Titans, raised in mockery of Mount Olympus. Mountaintops touch on adjacent spheres, and one can also travel by the Styx or by flying. In the void, there are rumored to be ultra-powerful monsters. One may hear a weird music that promises to fulfill one's deepest wish. Follow it, and you either vanish or return drained of 1d20 wisdom. The communities are full of fake religious leaders and people who led causes they knew were bogus. They will glad-hand you and try to recruit you. Bastion is the Revolutionary League's home. It is carved from black volcanic rock. The best face-change surgery is available here. Ochre-drab pools extending into the astral appear in the foul fens, and can be moved freely. The color contrasts with the overall red hues, indicating a gateway to another world. Portals to the Outlands, the Gray Waste or the Abyss are often doorways within obelisks. Most of the locals are are unable to use these portals, and perhaps the adventurers will have difficulty doing so as well. This is a common location for the headquarters of weird sects devoted to misfortune, and to cults where the upper echelon know it's all bunk. Consists of a war-ravaged landscape of swamps and stagnant rivers crossed only by spotted ranges of mountains. Several Greek Titans live on Othrys in the realm of Mount Othrys; furthermore, Raiden maintains his Palace of Thunder on Othrys. Cathrys is a universe of overblown crimson jungles, where all the plants and animals are poison (1d6 damage to exposed flesh every round, rots metal in 1d8 rounds). There are also scarlet grasslands that are more habitable. Fetaphon is a jungle town of cruelty and slave labor, built on rope bridges over a bubbling tar pit. The locals throw folks into the tar from time to time to feed the monsters so that they will leave the town alone. Hill giant heaven is a savage territory here. Cathrys (also called The Crimson Jungle), is a layer of thick jungles and open plains of razored grass. Talona's realm Palace of Poison Tears can be found on Cathrys, as can The Steading, the realm of hill giant deity Grolantor. *Apothecary of Sin: Located deep in the fetid jungles of an orb of Cathrys is the Apothecary of Sin. The Apothecary is built from cunningly woven scrap wood atop the trunk of large tree, raising the one-story structure high above the waving branches of the acid-laden leaves below. Rope-suspended catwalks provide access above the treetops, though random sections are missing, possibly victims of caustic storms. Mundane and exotic poisons and acids are bought and sold in the Apothecary. A demon called Sinmaker runs the Apothecary. Sinmaker is a glabrezu of average abilities, except for his special affinity for acids, poisons, and venoms. He delights in all things poisonous—the more diabolical, the better. All the poisons found on Table 3–16: Poisons in the DUNGEON MASTER’s Guide are available in the Apothecary, as well as many special, unique concoctions bought by Sinmaker from travelers or synthesized in Sinmaker's ownlaboratory. Acid is also sold here, by the one-dose vial or by the thousand-dose keg. Neither the size of the purchase nor the nature of the buyer matters to Sinmaker. Minethys (Greek "minytheo", to waste away) is a desert universe of red sand, sharp like ground glass, where the air is a stinking cloud. The wind blows hard here, driving sand into unprotected skin for 1d6 damage/round. It can be used to travel from sphere to sphere. Each day, a tornado comes on 1 on d12, and takes the adventurers to some other lower plane. Pyts is one sphere in this world, where visitors lose one point of charisma daily; upon reaching zero, they are transformed into hideously ugly forms but keep their own minds and dispositions. Only the locals can influence the undead in Pyts, and any holy water brought here supposedly turns to poison. (Or maybe the locals simply find it objectionable.) Notable locations on Minethys include Coeus' Temple, dedicated to the Titan of the same name; The Mausoleum of Pain of the dragon god Faluzure; Karontor's The Rack of Injustice; and Trickster's Delight, the realm of the naga deity Parrafaire. *Sand Tombs of Payratheon: Payratheon is the name of a vanished city built on an orb of Minethys eons ago. That city is long buried, but its sand-drowned avenues, crumbled towers, and silted porticos still remain far below the shifting surface of the layer. Sometimes the shifting sands reveal Payratheon for an hour or a longer, but it is always engulfed again by the sands, smothering most creatures who were tempted by its appearance and entered the sand-blasted city. Particularly resourceful adventurers have burrowed down to find outlying suburbs of the city during its phases of submersion. Tales of terror walk hand in hand with these accounts, which tell of dragonlike “sand gorgons” that swim through the sand as if water. Also mentioned are the remnants of former inhabitants that force their way through the streets as petrified undead, so weathered and eroded that little can be discerned of their race or original size. Colothys This is a maroon universe of preposterous high mountains and deep canyons. There are avalanches, wandering monsters, and so forth. Gallowshome is built around a supposed portal to Sigil inside a cave. Inside the cave is a five-mile expanse, the floor (half a mile below the entry ledge) covered with titanic bones, and the ceiling hangs with titanic bodies dangling from ropes, their throats all cut. Maggots infest the bodies and drop from them to an unknown destiny; the maggots are the souls of sinners and are supposedly keeping the giants dead. You need to cross somehow to get through the portal, and the maggots will attack you. Maybe this is just a trap. Malar's realm is habitable, and here primitives hunt game. The more cruelly you kill your meat, the better it tastes. Those with nature skills get +4 against being surprised, as their senses are sharper. Sigil's prison has an extension here, and they may sell criminals to be hunted for fun. Crius' Temple, dedicated to the Titan of the same name, can be found here; furthermore, Ellaniath, the realm of the drow deity Vhaeraun, and The Land of the Hunt, realm of the god Malar, are located on Colothys. *Garden of Malice: The hanging gardens of Colothys are found on a single orb of the layer that travelers would do well to avoid. To the inexperienced eye, many of the cliff faces and sheer slopes of this orb are home to thick vines and tubers that sprout a riot of beautiful flowers. Characters who attempt to collect samples for their botanical collections quickly learn that the vines are animate and determined to wring the life from any creature that would dare to use them as climbing aids, defoliate the flowers, or even move too close. It may be that the animate vines represent one large organism that has grown through the eons to cover one whole orb. Once every six hundred days, the vines release tiny seeds into the air that look like dandelion fluff. The winds of the layer often send the seeds blowing across several hundred other orbs of the mountainous realm. Though many are eaten by vermin, many other seeds have also found nourishing soil, and have sprouted tubers in small nooks and forgotten cliff-faces on other orbs. Porphatys This is a wet, cold universe filled with deep-red acid snow, which melts into corrosive lakes. Cloth rots in 1d6 rounds, but leather and metal are unaffected. Residents of the lakes fight one another to be able to stand on sandbars. Oceanus' Temple, dedicated to the Titan of the same name, is located on Porphatys. *Ship of One Hundred: A ship rides the cold swells of Porphatys's seas, called the Ship of One Hundred, though in some accounts it is referred to as the White Caravel. It appears as a ghost-white caravel unmanned by any visible crew. It wends between the islets of many orbs (somehow disappearing on one orb and appearing on another), picking up stranded souls and other travelers who are brave (or foolish) enough to brave passage. Passengers soon discover that apparently no one moves on board the craft. The lower deck and hold are stuffed with exactly one hundred unadorned stone sarcophagi. No one has ever successfully opened a sarcophagus and lived to tell the tale. Any time this has been tried, some unrecorded calamity devours all creatures currently on board, and the next time the ship puts in at a new port it is utterly empty of life. Stories have it that the ship seeks to deliver its terrible cargo, but it waits for the end times to do so. Between the “cleansings” that occur when the curious try to open a sarcophagus, travelers (mostly petitioners, demons, or other creatures) infest the ship. Some make it their temporary home, happy to move from place to place by whatever mysterious force steers the ship. These denizens take a very dim view of visitors who want to open a sarcophagus. Agathys is a universe of blood-red ice and extreme cold, where the ice moves and entraps those who pretended to love other individuals for the purpose of betraying them and the slow, crushing agony of petitioners frozen into it being heard Apomps' Three-Sided Palace, realm of the demodand (gehreleth) lord Apomps, can be found on Agathys. *Necromanteion: A black citadel carved out of ice is the focus of the greater deity Nerull's realm. Nerull is a deity of death and is called the Reaper, the Foe of All Good, the Bringer of Darkness, and similar names. Petitioners are frozen flush into the floors, walls, and ceilings of the Necromanteion, just as they are in the surrounding ice. The deserted entrance to the Necromanteion leads quickly to a wide hall called the Hidden Temple, which crawls with undead of all types. The pallid, green glow of gibbering ghoul-light lanterns illuminates the area. Hundreds of onyx altars are evenly spaced around the hall, and demonic clerics constantly chant stanzas of a ghastly necromantic ritual. Besides chanting, the demonic priests spend endless hours attending grotesque experiments on necrotic flesh piled on other altars. Nerull's throne stands at the center of the Hidden Temple. Woe betide the character who disturbs Nerull, a rust-red skeleton wearing a dull black cloak. Always clutched in Nerull's skeletal hands is his sablewood staff. Lifecutter, which projects a scythelike blade of scarlet force that has the power to slay any creature. The Hidden Temple has several satellite chambers. Some hold food and quarters for the demonic clerics, others have cells for living captives destined to be strapped onto an onyx altar (or become food for a hungry cleric), and in some are special vaults where the relics of Nerull's faith are sealed away. Finally, small tunnels lead deeper into the ice of the layer, supposedly connecting to vaults of horror so ghastly that even the demonic priests shy from exploring their depths. Otherworldly wailing and whispers rise up from the depths. Spell alterations in Carceri Magic used for selfish purposes, that benefits the caster and makes the rest of the world a worse place, is at maximum effectiveness. Magic cast for an altruistic purpose always requires a spell key. Alterations produce the greatest possible evil, or at least horrid side-effects. Expect to see screaming faces in things produced by magic. Summoned creatures are free-willed, and must be bribed. All divinations require the sacrifice of a comrade, and the answer appears in the spreading blood pool. Healing spells are at half-effect. Raised undead are free-willed and usually attack their creator. Harmful necromancy gets +1/die. Elemental effects may be double to nil, depending on the environment. I respectfully suggest that all spells involving transportation including "plane shift" and "gate", lead to a random destination somewhere in Carceri, near or far depending on the spell. *Wizardly spell keys are a lead necklace for alterations. A round magnet for conjurations. A pint of your own blood for divinations. A fiend's thighbone for necromancy. And so forth. Power keys are symbols of the cult, and are rarely given. *Color for pools from the astral is olive. Ethereal curtains might be gray-green. These must be the after-images of red. *The dead are immune to cold and acid, and as an additional ability get +10 on bluff checks. *The plane is "mildly evil-aligned". Good creatures have -2 on charisma checks. *-1 on all charimsa checks for all lawful creatures *-1 on all intelligence, wisdom, and charisma checks for all non-good, non-evil creatures *-2 on all intelligence, wisdom, and charisma checks for all good creatures. *Good-based spells simply fail. *Evil-based spells work as if caster were 4 levels higher. *Law-based spells (non-good) require a Spellcraft check (DC 15) for success. *Chaos-based spells (non-good) work as if caster were 2 levels higher. Links Portals on many planes allow travel onto Carceri. But almost none allow access in the other direction. One exception is the River Styx, which runs through the first layer of Carceri, mixing with the bogs and canals that crisscross the orbs of this layer, on its way to the Gray Waste of Hades. Inhabitants Almost no creatures live on Carceri voluntarily. The exiled, the shunned, and the defeated are sent here, as are traitors, backstabbers, and the souls of those with underhanded ambition. It's the prison plane, pure and simple. Carceri's residents are thus a mixed bag, racially and culturally. Most continually plot and scheme to leave Carceri and find their way back to their homes and former positions. Besides prisoners and petitioners, Carceri hosts fiends that partake in the endless Blood War. Demons, devils, and yugolorhs all roam Carceri, as do madly galloping nighnnares and other evil outsiders. Carceri Petitioners Even if they wanted to, Carceri's petitioners couldn't leave, so they hold a powerful resentment for visitors merely passing through. Most petitioners on Carceri are souls who abused trust and betrayed friends or family. Like all petitioners, they have no memory of their past lives, but they remain treacherous. They lie—constantly, compulsively, and with great cunning. Petitioners on Carceri reside on one of five layers according to their particular treachery. Orthrys holds politicians and national traitors, and Cathrys holds those who gave in to animal lusts when logic and reason would have served better. Minethys imprisons hoarders who could have helped others with their wealth but didn't, and Colothys confines liars whose untruths harmed others. Finally, Porphatys is home to the shallow and selfabsorbed who refused to aid others when the opportunity presented itself. Carceri's petitioners have the following special petitioner qualities: Additional Immunities: Cold, acid. Resistances: Electricity 20, fire 20. Other Special Qualities: Petitioners on Carceri lie often and well, receiving a +10 competence bonus on Bluff checks. Movement For characters on an orb of Carceri, movement functions normally. Once a character gets more than 100 feet off the surface of an orb, gravity disappears. But unlike other planes with the no gravity trait, force of will doesn't provide a means of locomotion. Characters need a fly spell or another means of movement to reach a different orb. Carceri's natives sometimes use ferrous sleds that slide through the air as if it were solid, skin balloons filled with hot air, and spinnerets whose 1oo-foot silk lengths catch the wind and pull a traveler off a high mountain to a random destination. Certain channels of the Styx and well-hidden proper portals allow movement between Carceri's layers. Combat on Carceri functions like it does on the Material Plane. Lore Here is the dark of Carceri, cutter --nobody's here that wants to be. The exiled, the shunned and the defeated are sent on these plane. This is the prison plane. The plane's residents plot and scheme to leave Carceri and find their way back to their homes and ways of life. Carceri's got six layers, each nested within the one before it. Each layer is composed of a series of orbs, a little like the worlds of the Prime Material Plane, but not as far apart. A traveler can fly from one orb to another in the same layer, assuming he has got the means. The only true native intelligent creatures of Carceri are the gehereleths, a disgusting bunch of fiends that are fortunately found in small numbers. Prisoners of Carceri include the Titans, a group of near-power-status beings imprisoned here long ago by the powers of Mount Olympus. All of the petitioners on the plane are prisoners, unable to leave even if they wanted to. Other residents of the plane include evil giants, cruel hunters serving the power Malar, terrible jungle creatures called vaath and the desert-dwelling gautiere. Planewalkers shouldn't plan a trip to Carceri without making sure that they know how to get back home first. A cutter might want to visit the Bastion of Last Hope, a fortress in the control of the Revolutionary League. In this place a planewalker can obtain all types of forged documents, surgical alterations to aid disguise and various other dirty enterprises. Gate-town Curst. It's a semi-circular town protected by walls. Semi-circular streets divide Curst in five concentric wards. This town is full of exiles and refugees. The gate: it's located in the central ward and it's composed by four pillars of black razorwine with in the middle a sinister halo of red light. Structure Carceri is filled by desolate landscapes, little life and no redeeming qualities. Fury’s Heart is a turmoil of storms, howling winds, crashing waves, biting blizzards and wild beasts. Actively seeking to crush it. More Tartarus, the Red Prison, the Great Cage, the Hollow Plane, Il Carceri. Built of lies both soothing and violent, secrets preserved and broken, words raped and left without meaning, it was broken from the Mountain of Stories before the Titans' Clash and left to eternally eat itself like a serpent with its tail in its mouth, an infinite circle surrounding nothing. It seems, superficially, to be the most gentle of the planes of evil, but nothing can be trusted here. Even betrayal itself will be betrayed on this plane, for here all plans strive to reveal themselves before their fruition. Carceri can be as savage as the Beastlands, as evil as Gehenna, as conniving and cruel as its sky is wide. It's the plane of chaos repressed, where anger moves like a slow capricious liquid, a plane of death and disease without order, of betrayal, obscenity, stories whose endings thwart their beginnings, rats fighting to the death over a rat carcass, and evil hidden within evil, all of it looking for a way out. In Carceri, everyone's looking for a way out, and betrayal is the best way to do it. Betrayal is movement, food, and life itself. Most importantly, betrayal is escape. Has there ever been a cage as sure as Carceri? It holds the titans, primal powers of reality left to rot, separate from the existence they spawned. Older powers are there too, banished paradigms that never had a chance to bloom, imprisoned on the plane before the titans were ever conceived. More prisoners join the boiling sea of treachery; the ghosts of cross-traders and knights of the post, things too untamed for either Law or Chaos to accept, begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil in the plane's endless succession of circular forms, endlessly turning on itself in the eternal quest for escape. Betrayal is strength. Strength is freedom. Freedom and strength are forms of betrayal. The only way to get out is to turn the loop into a spiral. The banished must become stronger than the banisher, nearly impossible on a plane where every plan is eaten by the last, where the flood of lies and revelations buries all within a malific airy sea, and where betrayal is betrayed till all dissolves into the emptiness of its heart. What can the titans do to trump the great betrayal of the Olympians so long ago? Where can they find their strength, where can anyone find purchase in the slippery ground of Carceri, cut off from all sources beyond by walls of their own making? There are whispers of those who've done it: Pagne Cacolyn, who rode on the failure of a wide-ranging yugoloth plot to destroy a Harmonium officer on Arcadia; Deck Liverpatch, who launched a conspiracy of astral seekers to frame a half-nalfeshnee tyrant in the Abyss. The master translator One-tooth salvaged the half-coherent sputterings of the dying birds (who pecked one another nearly to death) to the satisfaction of a serpent queen, an event that won Liverpatch his liberty. Kern Pon rebuilt her sabataged ship from sawdust into something no one in her homeland had ever seen. Then there was Caspirin the Redeemer, who united a fallen gate town for one day, using virtue to cheat the Red Prison of a piece of itself. Such a thing doesn't -- can't -- happen very often. Each time is legend, because it requires belief enough to tear away the plane's oily strands in proportion to the crime that bound them. To destroy any part of a universe's system of desire lines is no small feat. Visitors and travellers who (foolishly) enter the Red Prison of their own free will can exit it with difficulty, but the path is treacherous. They must be constantly on their guard for those who would cut off their escape, for this would be banishment, and the cycle of imprisonment and betrayal would begin. For the banished, the Styx has no outlet -- it loops through Carceri's orbs with no beginning and end. For the banished, no ordinary portal key will suffice. Look and Feel Carceri has six layers, six hollow shells, one within the other like layers of an onion or a cross-trader's mind. Each layer is made up of orbs, spherical worlds that turn on themselves at every point. Orb after orb, glowing in the eternal night like red eyes or volcanic seeds shining without heat, a hellish light filling the plane, dulling the conscience and sharpening the wits. The Road of Organs (Site) Hearsay. The way to ascension is on the backs of your victims, or at least someone's victims. Description. The largest known suspension bridge on the planes, a seemingly endless highway made of bound intestines. It is said to have been made from the guts of a race of titans by vengeful gods. Special Features. It stinks, for one. The reason bashers use this dubious highway is its convenience. It links over twelve orbs together, and extends beyond into the Carceri's lower layers, where it links several orbs there, and ends in the Abyss, where demon worms feast on the regenerating entrails and tanar'ri hosts use it as their entry into the endless frays of their blood red war with the baatezu. The City of Sacrilege (Town) Character. The powers are evil. They will betray all of your devotion and reward you with eternal damnation. They deserve a little damnation of their own. Ruler. The City of Sacrilege is a theocracy of a sort, ruled by a council of gautierre "priests." These clergy are schooled in the ancient gautierre doctrine of hate and betrayal. Direct descendents of the priests revered by the guatierres' Outlandish ancestors, the priests of today gain no spells. Their only purpose is to ensure that their people never, ever forget their past. The City of Sacriledge is one way for them to do this. The council ensures that all visitors to the city adhere to their ancient religious laws and that all the shrines are properly defiled every day. It's important to note that most gautierre priests are not Athar: they don't doubt the powers are gods; that doesn't mean they like them. It's much more emotional that way. Behind the Throne. Grandfather Wordbreaker (Planar/Male/Gautierre/Priest 8/CE) is the most influential of the council, an influence he won after his legendary destruction of a shrine to Apomps in his youth. The sheer audacity of this move and the fact that he somehow got away with it (the gehreleths to this day have not found out who the culprit was) ensured that he would be idolized for life. Unfortunately, this act has become a great burden for the cleric. He has done nothing since then nearly as worthy as praise, and he constantly labors under the thought that he is a fraud and a has-been, causing him to doubt his every decision. He continues to rule, but his insecurity shows, and some of the younger gautierre have begun to agree with their elder's secret nightmares. Description. The gautierre City of Sacrilege is a very unusual holy city dedicated to the defamation of every power the fierce nomads have ever heard of. The greatest crime possible is to treat a god with respect, or to put its shrine out of its misery. Militia. Fantical gautierre warriors patrol the town, accompanied by a priest constantly barking out orders. In ordinary situations, these orders are ignored as the warriors spend most of their time hurling spears about, shouting, and guarding the places of entertainment very, very closely. When an outsider makes trouble, however, they are ready and eager to attack. Services. This is a great place to get icons of a wide variety of divinities, if you don't mind 'em stained, broken, and written on. This is a good place to sell them, too if you don't act like you like them. Gautierre mercenaries are available, too, for a price. Current Chant. A furious army lead by clergymen from the Prime (isn't it always the Prime?) are making preparations for an assault through what their legends call the Veil of Ribs deep within a mountain's heart. The leader of the expedition, one Bishop Ingraine (Pr/Male human/P 8/LN) had a vision in which he saw an icon of his goddess defiled in a city of red dust. Ambitious, hoping to prove himself in a country that badly needed a war to unify it, nothing would do for the Bishop but to avenge this insult personally, with large numbers, and his vision showed him how to do it.. It seems that their patron earth goddess imprisoned an evil demigod of war and disease in the dawn time and the Veil of Ribs was the bars to his cage. He's only just found the Veil, and managed to borrow and steal enough power to project a vision into the willing heart of an ambitious priest. Whether or not the army reaches Sacrilege, the world they left should become a very different place. Freed demigods tend to make it so... Othrys A proxy of Hesta is in charge of playing the factions in tartarus off each other, heightening betrayal through betrayal and preventing any alliance from enabling the titans' freedom. A Revolutionary League cell describe is attempting to help the titans rise up against their Olympian jailers. They call themselves the Luddites. They're led by a dwarven tiefling named Olmik and a satyr (from the Pain of the World) named Percis. The proxy has taken the form of an attractive young woman garbed in the style of an ancient goddess. She is the lover of the Good Shepherd. GD is a revolutionary from Ancient Rome. Now he's a warlord in Carceri with no interest in revolutionaries at all. Pretty Proxy has convinced him that the anarchists are a threat to his reign, and so he is sending a night hag with a black shawl to declare war. The anarchists use black shawls to communicate amongst themselves. PP knows this. Alright, the PCs get their laundry mixed up with that of a stout widow woman (with a giant son), including a black shawl. A night hag is also involved, and possibly a chain. Maybe the shawl is chained to the nighthag somehow? noble anarchists threatened by fiendlord -> Darkon-> Ur-Titans' Alice in Wonderland Queen of HeartsKnave of HeartsWhore of Heart---> cups (Tartarus),Escort a widow's shawl secretly to a relative. tunnels, skies, Seas, pits The leader of the anarchists is called The Warlord of the Air. He has secretly been having his dangerous rabble construct great zeppelins under the watchful eyes of expatriate engineers. They intend to defeat the fiendlord. Seek the Gate of Fate , the place of testing in Carceri, to destroy it before your foes use it to escape. from the Red Prison. It is believed to be in the Swamp of Gnats , filled with bloodsucking parasites and insect-demons and guarded by white apes, mutated human slaves of the gehreleths. Watch out for a one-eyed, arthritic old man and Gyase the Deathless, a dwarven dembion of immense age, a lichlike creature with mezzoloth features. Then travel in the Climbs of Loathing in the realm of the giants, where the high priest of Freedom will feed the key to the dragon Ladon. Wield it against a warped old crone, a night hag who has long been the dragon's lover. The secret library of the gehreleths. (Site) Hearsay. Made of iron and triangular in shape, this is a storehouse for the shators' poetry and lore. What do they use it for? They're compulsive; they collect for its own sake. They barely know what they're doing themselves, the stupid beasts. Ruler. A shator named Genizeus with a fallen noctral familiar called Gomengod. Genizeus is a graying winged corpse of a shator, like a melting shrub with feet. He speaks to Gomengod constantly, asking it its opinions on every little matter. Behind the throne. Behind the throne rule the books themselves, which contain the souls of shators long dead, or perhaps the souls of the corpses they're made from. Do they guard their rulers, their prisoners, or themselves? Love is in the air any way. Description Weren't you listening? Made of iron and triangular in shape! Militia Gehreleths! Duh. Maybe undead. Maybe all undead are controlled by the gehreleths. Services Books. Fresh water. A fountain of blasphemy. Fine art. Magical paintings. Living statues. An ear to the shators and their conspiracies. Current chant Phirblas liberating the words, becoming corrupted and imprisoned in the books themselves. Other phirblas coming to rescue them and also becoming corrupted. So it goes. Rule of Darks (Realm) Character. Secrets always contain secrets. Power. Power lies in the laws of nature, and the entities that personify aspects of them. The present themes of the multiverse (including the Rule of Threes, Unity of Rings, and Center of All) aren't the first. Earlier truisms, lost to the multiverse at large, hold on in Carcerated realms, banished by the newer orders along with the titans and Apomps. In these realms, if nowhere else, the old laws hold sway. Unity of Pentacles Events always pass through five major points and five minor ones before returning to the beginning. Unity of Pentacles has ten cities, accordingly, and a complicated trade route. Each city has ten rulers. Each ruler has ten fingers and ten toes. Titans = Ancient wrongs, fallen ideas and natural forces. Forces imprisoned from the rest of reality (ancient, supressed paradigms) Rule of Mass: Mass creates gravity. Bigger things are heavier. Bigger orbs are more attractive to other bodies. There are high-gravity and low-gravity creatures. Titans = Ancient wrongs, fallen ideas and natural forces. Forces imprisoned from the rest of reality (ancient, supressed paradigms) The Pain of the World (gaea says "Ow") Positive energy warring with more positive energy. Airships with propellers. An endless chasm filled with tentacular white light fighting tentacular blue light. The nymphs, treants, and the spirits of the unborn tearing each other apart with their teeth and fingers. Parties of adventurers searching for the spirits that will, when combined, allow their faction to triumph. Gates to the Inner Planes and the Prime, so that creatures from all over the multiverse can quest here. An inverted Grail that holds spirits of appropriate resonance. Hole in the Sky - (Agathys); horrors pour out. The source of the Pain of the World's troubles. The original aborted children of Gaea, before the titans. Cities on the edge of the sky. Towns. Obscene Bunny Bulimia: styx realm of eating disorders in Othrys. Exiled pain, betrayed body, lying image. Skeleton: Eating realm of flesh disorders. The skeleton is the bones of the orb, lying anorexic and exposed. Nerull's carceric realms: The Crypt (othrys): The Crypt is Nerull's most cosmopolitan throne, filled with fawning demodands, liches and ghouls, and pet ultraloths with their minions. And borribles. The River Styx runs through here. Only Nerull and a few of his elite servants are free to come and go. The Sarcophagus (cathrys) betrays the first realm. Where the Crypt was cosmopolitan and full of trade, the Sarcophagus contains an elite few who pull the strings in both realms. They have amazing power. The Casket (minethys) betrays the Sarcophagus, showing that the elite aren't so elite at all, since the Casket contains many, many others of the same nature. The Styx runs through here as well. The Funeral Mask (colothys) is the headquarters for a plot to kill all the inhabitants of the Casket so that those of the Sarcophagus may reign supreme under the leadership of the Funeral Mask's assassins. The Wrappings (porphatys) plot against Carceri itself, planning to blow it open and return it to Pluton, under Nerull's reign. Ideas: dam the Styx Free the abortions Conquer everything in the name of Order (diabolic allies) The Chains of Darkon (agathys) beneath the Necromanteion has the corpse of Nerull's father bound. If Carceri was gone, Darkon would be free, so the Wrappings are a lie. art bosch giger il carceri Out of sight, out of Mind. The Hen: a lizard thing with wings sitting on an orb. The lizard thing ate its children, but refuses to believe it. It's transferring its motherly feelings toward the orb. What if it hatches? Blocked subconscious. Orb = head, thought.The Eye: an orb that looks back at you. Innner Knowing; The Bars; big iron pillars, connecting orbs of Othrys; Carceri: The Land of Unfolding Darks; Cannonball: what else can we do with an orb? Exiled batallions, secret war. Carceri: successive layers in the inner self. Greek darks: 1.Gigantes. Whirl!2. Hectonchire3. Titans5. Uranus -- hiding out.6. Erebus -- hidden by Gaeaherself.Sara's Carceri:1.Water Land2. Faeries3. Giant faeries, humpty dumpty4. Wonderland5. Yellow Slug. Mr. Gone1. I am Zeus5. I hate Mommy6. Mommy hates me. Julie's Carceri1. Leopard Queen2. Isz horde.5. Field of bones6. Inner corruptionCity on the Edge there. The Shattered Orb: (Site) Description: An orb of Carceri lies split open like an egg. What could cause this destruction? Worldbreaker -- the adamant axe of the gods. Worldbreaker was used to sever Mount Olympus from Mount Othrys and trap the titans there for all eternity. For fear of its power, it was then hidden away in the furthest place the gods knew -- Carceri. Worldbreaker was hidden in a box fit to hold the worlds' ills deep beneath the ice of Agathys. As the Fates willed it, a kelubar happened to fall through a mysterious crack in the ice and found the axe. Delighted, as a kelubar will be, with the prospect of a magical item, the kelubar crawled out and wielded it at the first opportunity. Now, after causing a considerable amount of havoc early on, the kelubar strides the plane like a proud god. Without any need for support from Apomps, the kelubar has gone so far as to shatter its own iron triangle and run unfettered. Now, without its knowledge, three factions are after the creature. The Olympians desire to have the axe hidden away again. The gehreleths wish to punish the renegade. The Doomguard is avidly looking for the axe, dreaming of the destruction they could cause. Severence (town) Character. As if all of a hydra's heads were ganging up on its tail, the outward forms you show to others have been set free. They're coming for you. Ruler. The yagnoloth Lakerus, a sadistic bastard known for cutting pieces off his enemies, controls the most powerful faction in the city. Lakerus has fallen on hard times of late; his arm has been replaced by a mechanical thing created from greensteel and a living limb cut from a retriever. Half of his head has been replaced by an enormous obsidian eye from the City of Glass and Vine. Behind the throne. The supremacy of the yugoloth overlords was challenged several decades ago by a slave uprising. By means of an artifact called the Five-Armed Prism (crafted by the eladrin known as Dancing Lord) the slaves managed to cut away what the city's populacewas from how it was perceived. Ruling suddenly became much more difficult as the yugoloths were confronted by doubles representing what they meant to their slaves. After many cycles, the city has stablized into uneasy balance between the competing factions. The slave have been able to scratch out a bit of status for themselves by playing their multiple masters off of each other. Another advantage they have is the assistance of the servile toadies the yugoloths saw in them. They can't be trusted, but they can be bossed around by anyone, including their more dynamic doubles. Description. A city divided between the yugoloths and their human slaves, between signifier and signified, what is and the endless hunter reflections of meaning. Severence is a port city on the Styx and receives and benefits from trade throughout the Lower Planes, although most do not stay long for fear that the many faces they wear will try and kill them. Severence is in Carceri. Militia. Severence is patrolled by mezzoloths, slaves not being trusted with weapons. The problem is, each major rival for the throne has his own army (each army consisting of up to 30 groups of three). It's fortunate that mezzoloths don't have much personality, or there'd be more. There are about half as many dergholoths, and about twelve piscoloths running the various armies. There were once more, but those aspects whose troops didn't duplicate with them were executed. Spymaster Targa was nicknamed the Many even before the Severing because of her masterful use of disguise in keeping order within the city. Though created a nycoloth, she managed to convince the populace that she was (variously) an arcane, a tiefling, an imp, a shator, a babau, a human revolutionary , and a slaad. Rooting out trouble and manipulating the various leaders and upstarts was child's play for this sly cutter, and promotion seemed assured. Frustrated as all her carefully created identities were stolen by living facades ignorant of her plans, she tried to create new personas only to have them become real, seperate entities as fast as she killed them. Furious now, Targa finds most of her time hiding in the shadows and killing random passerby, grateful that almost no one knew of her real persona (even Atrophus, since she was appointed by the ultraloths). What sh e doesn't know is that even now the murders she commits in her silent rage is creating a rival serial killer, one even more silent, and more invisible than Target herself. It's ironic that the human Jacquie, (Female human thief 14) who was a brilliant revolutionary when she was actually Targa, has grown even better since then. The current Jacquie is the primary leader of the human resistance, and it's beginning to look as if she might win. Even the most overblown exaggerations of her prowness have so far been evaded, allowing the rebel leader to continue her work with relative efficiency. One aspect of Jacquie that hasn't changed since she stopped being a nycoloth spy is her dislike for Paul, the mastermind who found the Prism. The original Paul has been dead for some time now, replaced by one more amicable to Jacquie's schemes. Services. The rewards of having the perfect alibi are tempting enough that many brave the city's violence and unrest to collect aspects of themselves. If it weren't for the duplicates' murderous dispositions, even more would. Due to the trouble Severence is having with its organization, Current Chant. Farrow, a shadowelf from Sigil, has been making inquiries about Severence, believing that it might help him with a problem he has. bridge of worlds (site) Heresay. Upon a time Heriel was quickly slain at the Bridge of Worlds (in Carceri) by a huge goblin (actually something else), in defiance. Avenge it. We will pay your expenses. Appearance. The bridge of worlds is an expanse of sculpted stone bridging two orbs. Special features. The bridge is very old, and fragile. The weight of more than six humans will cause the bridge to begin to crack. Heriel was an astral deva who ran afoul of local gehreleths. The Dark: There are six bridges, one for each of Carceri's Dantean layers. Each one replays the battle between Heriel and the gehreleths in a different way. The first bridge contains a community of gehreleth tieflings, with a sprinkling of aasimon blood. The second bridge is ruled by a mighty shator who has imprisoned a deva in a book of poetry. Some phirblas are trying to steal the book. The third bridge is a place of competing bridge engineers, each trying to sabotage the works of the other. One is a fallen deva. The fourth bridge has broken. A faint glow filters from the void. The fifth bridge has several feuding cities built on it. One of the cities is populated by undead and ruled by Heriel. The others have strange creatures like achaierai and vaati and goblins and whatever else. The gehreleths are Heriel's cronies, and tend to be smarter than she is. The sixth bridge has Heriel's corpse and the corpse of the gehreleths encased in ice. Carceric marble quarries Description. The marble is, of course, red-veined and is shipped through a nearby portal into Sigil. It's mined by slaves working off their debt to the Mercykillers. Many of the slaves have escaped and are organizing armies in the nearby hills. Some have joined the mines of Uranus, a rival quarry with black stone. Others are killing those slaves who won't escape fast enough. A few have managed to smuggle themselves back to Sigil in the marble as elemental beings, ghosts in the stone. One is being sculpted into a humanoid form (she was a slaad). Soon she will be free. The gate key to the quarry is a mephit's wing. Services. Marble, slaves, freedom fighters, anarchists. Realm of Tartarachus (Cathrys) Tartarachus was once a cervidal in Elysium, as innocent as anything. It happened, however, that rumors reached the Hero's Rest that a rogue baernaloth named Apomps had created a race of evil creatures. Tartarachus would have none of it, and decided to go to Carceri himself and tell Apomps what he thought of it. The journey was long and arduous for a young cervidal at the dawn of history, and by the time he got to the Red Prision Tartarachus' innocence was quite gone. He had become hard, even brutal; he had betrayed any ideal he once had. He still resembled a cervidal outwardly, but his hide was now a deep red, glowing with hideous multicolored light. He was still determined to reach Apomps, though, and when he finally reached the sphere of Agathys Apomps was there to greet him. "What did you want to ask me?" hissed Apomps in its triple voice. "I hear you've made a race of great and terrible evil," Tartarachus began. "Yes, I have," said Apomps. "What of it?" "Um," Tartarachus thought hard, but try as he might he couldn't remember why this was important. Then he had it: "Can you teach me?" Apomps could, and did. Before long Tartarachus had a race of his own: a race of twisted cervidal-like creatures that he called tartaruchians. The tartaruchians were made to herd petitioners back to their master; unlike him, they can escape the plane. Carceri Carceri